Connollyism, What

Contestable or not, I will just go ahead and say it: William Connolly is the most influential political theorist writing in English today. Readers of this journal will be less inclined to doubt this assertion than will others - in addition to the many books and students he has supplied to the field in the past four decades, he contributed the opening words of the first issue and his spirit inhabits many of its articles. The publication of The New Pluralism, a volume of essays examining his work and its significance, marks some kind of initial recognition of this influence, but I imagine there will be more volumes of a similar kind in years to come.

Nonetheless, to say what Connolly stands for, or what Connollyismmight be, is no easy task. This is not because Connolly's style is obscure. By the absurd standards of the field we share, his writing is open, lucid, generous and funny. But in his long career, he has written about so many theorists and taken an interest in so many subject areas, that it is not always clear what connects each of his books to the others.

The writers of The New Pluralismmake a variety of contributions to our understanding of Connolly's work but two in particular make an effort to answer this question. In the first essay, "A Pluralist Mind," editor Morton Schoolman surveys nearly all of Connolly's work and argues that "the appropriate place to launch a discussion about Connolly's pluralist theory, … and indeed the pluralism of his thinking generally, is with The Terms of Political Discourse…. [I]t introduces the concept at the nucleus of Connolly's work in every successor publication. "(20). That concept is "contestation".

Derived initially from W.B. Gallie's famous essay on "essentially contested concepts," in Connolly's hands Gallie's thesis is expanded to the point that "Contestation and politics are inseparable." Politics, Schoolman writes, "could not be deeper or broader [for Connolly] than the parameters outlined by contestation, a characteristic … that will remain throughout his work…" (28). In this narrative, Connolly's project begins with the weak, descriptive pluralism of Dahl and Berle (which always relied on the idea of an underlying consensus) and, through a growth process of openness and self-contention, undergoes a linear expansion until it reaches the "deep" pluralism of the more mature writing with its valorization of "agonistic respect". Hence it would be a mistake, Schoolman argues, to look for "radical discontinuities" in Connolly's thought (54). In other words, Connolly has always been Connolly, only now more so.

Thomas Dumm offers a contrasting view. He emphasizes Connolly's "voice" rather than any particular idea that gets spoken with that voice: "Connolly's voice enacts an inclination toward an ethical way of being" (70). How? Drawing on Thoreau, Heidegger and Cavell, Dumm describes voice, and hence Connolly's voice, not as a site of identity but as a site of mixture and change. The mouth is not the mind. Connolly, conscious of this, gives voice not just to his own ideas, but to those of others, not just his allies but also his antagonists: "Connolly will go to great lengths to avoid closure of his voice, including the enlistment of his enemies in the shaping of his voice" (72).

Connolly's "voice" then is not the simple expression of one man's ideas but a constant conversation all in itself, a conversation that began with Dahl, Gallie, Wittgenstein and Taylor, and moved on to Nietzsche, Foucault, Augustine, Heidegger, Deleuze and William James (to name only a few). Pluralism, from this perspective, is not merely a description of an ideally diverse polity, but of a diversification of...